Drafted a post for EGD2025

content/news/2025-10-15-egd2025/index.md

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+---
+title: "European Galaxy Days 2025: Many communities, one buzzing week in Freiburg"
+date: "2025-10-15"
+authors: "Armin Dadras, Björn Grüning, and Hans-Rudolf Hotz"
+tease: "1–3 Oct 2025, Freiburg: European Galaxy Days, ELIXIR Galaxy, and EuroScienceGateway members convened to align roadmaps and turn plans into solutions, tools, and workflows through talks, demos, and a CoFest."
+tags: [eosc, meeting, esg, esg-wp1, esg-wp2, esg-wp3, esg-wp4, esg-wp5, conference, egd]
+supporters: [eosc, unifreiburg, esg, elixir, eu]
+subsites: [all, esg]
+main_subsite: eu
+---
+From **1–3 October 2025**, the [University of Freiburg](https://uni-freiburg.de/en/) hosted a packed, three-in-one meeting: **European Galaxy Days (EGD)**, the **[ELIXIR Galaxy Community](https://elixir-europe.org/communities/galaxy) face-to-face meeting**, and the **[EuroScienceGateway (ESG)](https://galaxyproject.org/projects/esg/) Final Meeting** with ~100 participants (87 in person + 12 online). Running side-by-side, these events created a special week where platform maintainers, tool and workflow developers, and domain scientists aligned roadmaps and moved from slides to practical solutions and future collaborations.
+
+Across talks, demos, Birds-of-a-Feathers (BoFs), and a concluding hackathon, the week showed how the Galaxy ecosystem is advancing research across domains from [Microbiology](https://microbiology.usegalaxy.org/), [Materials Science](https://materials.usegalaxy.eu/), [Ecology](https://ecology.usegalaxy.eu/), [Climate Science](https://climate.usegalaxy.eu/), [Imaging](https://imaging.usegalaxy.eu/), and [Digital Humanities](https://galaxyproject.org/community/sig/digital-humanities/). Freiburg’s campus hosted hybrid sessions and BoFs across multiple rooms, with Friday dedicated to a focused Co-Fest & Hackathon where groups squashed bugs, improved tools, tuned workflows, and formed plans for next collaborations. Coverage rolled out on [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/tags/EGD2025), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/hashtag/EGD2025?author=galaxyproject.bsky.social), and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=%23egd2025&origin=HASH_TAG_FROM_FEED&sid=kCg) (47 posts with #EGD2025), while Matrix channels ([usegalaxy-eu Lobby](https://matrix.to/#/#usegalaxy-eu_Lobby:gitter.im) and [use-galaxy announce](https://matrix.to/#/!ArjKhGljVCmzqxhauY:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=matrix.uni-freiburg.de&via=t2bot.io)) supported live coordination and announcements.
+
+Slides & photos
+<!--- To do by Armin until next week --->
+  - Slides: 
+  - Photo gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/haiWYYBryV4pKvxe9
+
+Thank you to the University of Freiburg, [ELIXIR](https://elixir-europe.org/), the European Commission for making this event possible, and everyone who contributed talks, demos, code, and reviews. Community momentum is strong—the next cycle is already underway. Are you ready for [GCC2026](https://galaxyproject.org/events/gcc2026/) in Clermont-Ferrand (France) from June 22-24 2026?
+
+![EGD2025 Group photo taken by Pavan Videm](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3fbdb486-4167-4e9b-8f89-622b81a8994a)